The present disclosure relates generally to, among other things, the generation, maintenance, and use of data, metadata, and/or various data structures. As the amount of such information stored electronically continues to increase dramatically, approaches for managing this increasing amount of data become evermore important. Data typically is stored in a data storage using a two-dimensional approach, with each item of data corresponding to a row in at least one table that includes entries in respective columns of information. The mapping or other linking between tables provides the ability for the data to be linked to various other data, organizations, classifications, etc. The linking of various tables at different levels can thus produce a hierarchy of information relating to each stored data item. In order to attempt to provide some context for the data, metadata is often stored that provides additional information for each stored data item. For example, metadata might be used to associate a data item with one or more categories of data, as well as to provide information about those categories.
As the size of these hierarchies and the amount of data increases, the ability to manage the data and even locate specific data becomes more difficult. Further, as categories and other information can change over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and update all the appropriate stored information. Not only is it time consuming to locate the information, but it can be difficult to get back to that information at a later time without having to again go through the lengthy navigation process. Also, there is no way to easily share the location of that data without having to instruct another user as to how to locate the data, which then requires that user to also endure the navigation process. Various other aspects of these approaches are time consuming or inefficient, or come with various other deficiencies.